This Week in Beat Making: Hip-Hop Made in a Senegalese Hospital

Here's a crazy experiment: visit a hospital and try to make a beat using only sounds that you find at the facility. What would you come up with? This was a question we posed to our student—a Senegalese beat maker named Ina—and her counterparts, thousands of miles away in Fiji.

We took Ina to a health care facility outside of Dakar with a recording device, and asked her to collect audio samples. She grabbed all types of noises: babies crying, the sound of velcro being ripped off of a blood pressure gauge, the clanging of metal stretchers, and even goats roaming the hospital grounds. She also recorded interviews, asking children, patients, health workers and community leaders what they thought about family planning. These sounds became the foundation of an instrumental beat, which we hope will help raise awareness about family planning in West Africa.

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